Nearly three million people were forced from their homes in Syria in 2017, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said. The announcement came as the Assad regime has recently launched a new military campaign to displace more Syrian civilians, an act which the Syrian Coalition said it constituted “demographic change operations, war crimes and genocide.”
Accordion to figures it published on its Twitter page on Saturday, the ICRC said that as many as 2.9 million people had been displaced from their homes in Syria last year. It noted those civilians were “fleeing for their lives,” at a rate of “5 people every minute.”
February and March of 2018 witnessed the yet largest forced mass forced displacement operations against the local population of eastern Ghouta. The Damascus suburb was home to around 400,000 people before the launch of a ferocious onslaught by the Assad regime and Russian forces who used all types of internationally prohibited weapons in the assault on eastern Ghouta, including chemical weapons and the inflammable white phosphorous.
The Committee said that 241,667 people were displaced across Syria every month in 2017, at a rate of 55,769 people every week, 7,945 people every day, or 331 people every hour.
The Syrian Coalition has repeatedly warned of the danger of the continued mass forced displacement and demographic change operations against the civilian population in various areas across Syria. It stressed that such acts constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity that must not be ignored and whose perpetrators must be held accountable.
On March 25, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Ursula Mueller warmed of the escalating violence in northern rural Homs and southern rural Hama. She said that the latest military escalation was threatening the lives of some 210,000 people in the area. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
